The spectacular downfall of Flavio Briatore, one of grand prix racing's showmen, grabbed yesterday's headlines but it was the parallel fate of Pat Symonds, a much less colourful figure, that provoked mixed feelings within Formula One. Symonds had always been seen as one of the good guys – a quiet, thoughtful, decent and likable man who was brilliant at his job and had a real feeling for the sport.

To many observers Symonds's sudden and ignominious departure from his post as the Renault team's sporting director is the true indication of the depths to which Formula One has sunk, so low that its corruption can be held responsible for distorting the behaviour of such a man.

Briatore was different. Deep down he had no feeling for the essence of motor racing. He came into it knowing nothing, used his considerable intelligence to master its political dimensions and knew how to hire good people and let them get on with it while he posed for the photographers with his victorious drivers. But he always looked as though he could not wait for the race to be over and that the only reason for sitting on the pit wall was to attract yet more attention from the television cameras.

The man in the seat next to him, however, was fundamental to the actual business of a racing team. Symonds, who was born in 1953, started out as a mechanic and worked his way into Formula One, meaning that – like the generations of British team bosses that included John Cooper, Colin Chapman, Ron Dennis, Frank Williams and Patrick Head – he knew everything you needed to know in order to build and run racing cars. He grew up learning what sort of rules you could bend and what sort you obeyed without question, and he would have known that to get your second driver to crash in order to benefit the team leader was so far outside the realms of acceptability as to be virtually unimaginable.

What made him capable of imagining it or at least of putting into practice the product of someone else's imagination? It can only have been an environment in which cheating was at best tolerated and at worst encouraged, and in which crimes were punished not according to their intrinsic nature but according to the identity and status of the perpetrator.

Earlier this year the fate of Dave Ryan provoked similar emotions. Eleven months younger than Symonds, Ryan moved from New Zealand to England in the early 1970s, when he was still in his teens, and joined McLaren as a mechanic. He worked on the car of their second driver, Jochen Mass, and progressed through the ranks until he became the team's sporting director. And when, in Melbourne last March, he and Lewis Hamilton were unmasked as having lied to the race stewards in order to retain third place in the Australian grand prix, the entire paddock felt such a conspiracy to be quite out of character for the widely respected Kiwi.

Like Symonds Ryan lost his job as a consequence, along with Ron Dennis, his team principal. This week someone described Symonds and Ryan to me as the "collateral damage" of a power struggle that did not really concern them. The phrase is not quite accurate because it suggests that they were innocent bystanders. In fact they committed crimes against the sport and merited punishment but it was the people much higher up the sport who established the moral vacuum in which otherwise admirable men lost their bearings.

One leading team principal attacked me this week for suggesting that, under the joint rule of Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone, today's Formula One has acquired a "putrescent core". What about the honest mechanics who work their socks off, he said, or the tireless truckies who drive from one end of Europe to another in order to keep the grand prix circus going? Aren't they blameless?

Indeed they are. But if a betting scandal were unearthed within the world of horse racing, nobody would hold back from exposing it in order to spare the feelings of the stable lads or the workers on the refreshments stands. The team principal who disputed my views is one of those who should be looking at himself and asking how he and his rivals have allowed their sport to reach this dismal state and what they can do now to redeem it in the eyes of an outside world that currently views it with contempt.